carmen
…And maybe the atoms that make me have been here before, and maybe they will be here billions of years from now to witness the changing of the landscape. Or maybe they haven’t, and maybe they won’t. Who knows?
From that moment on the thought stayed with me – together with the bittersweet feeling that I’ll die not knowing.
January 2015. It’s four of us travelling with a rented car through Tinghir Oasis in southwestern Morocco. In the Todhra Gorge we leave the car and walk for a while on the path carved by water and asphalted by men. J., the wiser and more experienced traveler among us, suggests we take a break to take in the landscape. We spread to four different directions, each with our own thoughts.
Staring at those rocks it came to me that millions of years ago all of this was covered in water. In this area of Morocco they sell lots of ammonite fossils, remains of ancient marine animals that inhabited the space we now walk on.
Back in the car exuberance takes over me. I am here, now, an invisible dot in a time scale measured in billions. But I am here, now, and I am able to think and imagine (no matter how wrongly) things from the distant past and into the distant future. Exuberance becomes impatient generosity: I’d like aaall the world to have access to this wonderful and scary realization; or at least – my family and friends back home.
